Doughnuts and late-night hostels in Belfast

Cavanman's Diary

I picked up John McGahern’s masterful Memoir the other day and idly opened it on a page where he was talking about his father. Frank McGahern, a Garda sergeant and an interesting character to put it mildly, came from Gowna.

“I heard him one day in casual conversation with another man about how expensive oranges were when they were young,” McGahern writes.

“My father said he loved oranges then and, when he knew he was going to be married, he bought two dozen oranges in Galway and went to sit on a park bench and ate them all. He felt he would never be able to afford oranges again once he was married.”

It reminded me of a time when I was 14 and visiting my grand-uncle Matt in Belfast. Matt was a GAA reporter who regularly contributed to the Irish News and had a column in the Down Recorder called Matt’s Chat. He was a founding member of the Carryduff club and a Gaelic football fanatic who had written his first match report, on a game he was playing in, for the Fermanagh Herald when he was 15.

We went to Sainsbury’s and I had £2 in my pocket. I was a boy on a mission. I went straight to the bakery section and purchased 10 jam doughnuts.

When we got back to Matt’s house, I sat at the kitchen table, peeled back the paper bag and started munching. It was five o’clock. By quarter past, I had gone through eight doughnuts. Not to be a hog, I left it two hours before returning to polish off the other two.

My grandparents were there. I remember they couldn’t believe I had eaten 10 doughnuts in two sittings on the same evening. But young lads are never done eating anyway.

That trip to stay with Matt was my first time in Belfast. The second was when I was 16 and knew it all. Myself and my friend Eddie (at 18, he was the senior partner in this imbecilic duo), got the bus on a Friday evening. We were going to play a handball tournament at St Paul’s GAA club called the Golden Gloves.

I was in the U17 section; Eddie was entered in the Men’s C. Our first misstep was when we boarded the bus at Cavan station and realised the fare was almost £20. The budget was immediately under pressure.

We had both told our parents at home that we were going to stay with Matt, and we were – but not till the Saturday night. On the Friday, we were going to paint the town red. We’d worry about where to stay when the time came to it; no bother to us!

We got off the bus in the city centre and went into the Europa Hotel. After drinking two pints apiece, we threw what money we had left out on the table and took stock. It didn’t take long to count it, I can tell you.

We then had a brainwave and pumped a good whack of change into a ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ fruit machine (“this time next year, Rodney…”)… so that was another tenner gone. With no other option, we headed out into the night, naively confident, with no research done whatsoever, that we’d have no problem finding a hostel and that this dangerous town would be perfectly safe.

After a while, a friendly stranger, out for the night with his girlfriend, recognised us for what we were, a pair of lost idiots innocently walking into a very dodgy area with our GAA football bags on our shoulders. He quickly grasped the lie of the land and told us to turn around immediately.

He came with us to find a hostel. It was full but he took charge of the situation and convinced them to take us in. They must have taken pity on us. The next morning, we had a fiver left between us. We bought two apples and a bottle of water and got a taxi to ‘Andytown’ for the handball. We both lost our matches; by the time Matt collected us that evening, we were weak with hunger.

The next day, he was covering a Down vs Monaghan National League match in Scotstown and he dropped us home, where we kept quiet on our escapades.

Over the years, I have been back in Belfast a lot for handball but rarely for football. Cavan supporters of a certain vintage have great memories of Casement Park, where Cavan won famous Ulster finals in 1962 and 1969, sinking All-Ireland champions Down in both; but for followers my age and younger, the famous old ground may as well be on another planet.

In recent years, Casement has been locked up and overgrown as the saga surrounding its redevelopment has dragged on and on and on. I’ve only attended three matches there that I can remember. One was a draw with Derry in 2000, when Cavan looked dead and buried only for Dermot McCabe to fist home an equalising goal deep in injury time.

Another was a championship win over Antrim in 2008 and then a first-round National League loss in 2013. Not long after that, Casement was shut and the main population centre in the province has now gone the guts of a decade without a proper home to call its own.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Gaelic games have gone through a lull in the city in general in that time. Handball numbers, once the highest in the country in the 1990s, plummeted. In whole swathes of Belfast, in areas where there once was a Gaelic games tradition, soccer is the sporting pursuit of choice.

The GAA have recognised this and have pledged £1 million to reinvigorate it as part of a project called Gaelfast, the Regeneration Manager of which is Paul Donnelly, a member of the St Paul’s club, which was the focus of our ill-fated handball trip over 20 years ago.

Donnelly has spoken about “a poverty of expectation”, which the GAA is experiencing in the city.

“Transforming Casement Park is inextricably linked to renewal of the GAA in Belfast,” he told the Irish News three years ago.

“Gaelfast coaches interact with 4,000 schoolchildren every week, none of whom have ever set foot on Casement Park. Without proper infrastructure and increased, long-term investment, Gaelic Games in Belfast and Antrim will never fulfil its potential.”

It will be interesting to see what effect the revamping of the stadium, which, after years of objections and legal battles, was finally given the green light last week, will have on the Gaelic games landscape.

Maybe, it will be a case of ‘build it and they will come’ but a lot more than just bricks and mortar will be required to transform the fortunes of the GAA’s great under-achievers.

A few weeks ago, I was in Corrigan Park for the Cavan v Antrim match. Cavan played very well; Antrim were dreadful and their manager has since stepped down after just one year in charge. They seem as far away as ever from a breakthrough.

After that game, I met a few friends in the bar at the clubhouse, some of whom are heavily involved in the game in the city, and all agreed that Antrim were miles off the pace. The new stadium will go ahead now, politicians will have their photo taken as they cut the ribbon but the underlying problems still remain and will be much more difficult to solve.

The city itself seems to be on the up and is a more attractive, safer place than it was when my friend and I wandered innocently round it back then. But in terms of Gaelic games, it could be another generation at least before the wasteland is transformed.